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The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan by Jonathan Kirsch: Review

He could have escaped the Nazis, but he returned to their den, determined to keep fighting

Illustration for review of The Short Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan (Illustration by Raffi Anderian/Toronto Star)

Jonathan Kirsch

Jonathan Kirsch's The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat, and a Murder in Paris, Liveright Publishing, 320 pages, $29.50.

By James Macgowan

Fri., June 14, 2013

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A man walks into a room. Check that, not a man, a boy — all of 17. And not just any old room, but an office inside the German embassy. We are in Paris and the date is November, 7, 1938. This boy — a German-born Jewish refugee of Polish descent — has had enough. He has a gun and is intent upon teaching the Nazis a lesson. But he’s unsure of himself. He has already passed by the German ambassador, not recognizing him. To whom, then, will he teach his lesson? He is shown into an office. Presently, five shots are heard, and a killing ensues. But not immediately. It takes two days for his Nazi target — an insignificant low-level functionary named Gustav vom Rath — to finally die. Hours after that, the echo from Herschel Grynszpan’s five shots mutates into a monster called Kristallnacht. The persecution of the Jews enters a new and unimaginably horrific phase.

The Short Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan brings all of this to life in a way that is both fascinating and long-winded. Working from previous published accounts, Jonathan Kirsch draws an intimate picture of Grynszpan and his family, the plans the Nazis had for Herschel — he was to be used in a show-trial orchestrated by Goebbels “to demonstrate why every Jewish man, woman, and child in the world was a deadly enemy of the Third Reich” — and the sordid aftermath of his act. Kirsch is convinced that rather than being unjustly relegated to “the dustbin of history,” Grynszpan should be regarded “as the hero he sought to be.”

Until the war breaks out, Grynszpan is famous. His act lands him in a French prison and draws the attention of the world’s media and the Nazi elite. (In 1961, he will be mentioned in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, though Arendt calls him “a psychopath” and, ridiculously, a possible Gestapo stooge.) That he was troubled seems obvious, but what pushes him over the edge that November day is a newspaper report chronicling the suffering of those Jews who had been expelled from Germany to a Polish town called Zbaszyn. His family is among them. When his uncle with whom he lives refuses to send money to them, Grynszpan snaps and it is the next day that he enters the embassy.

As it turns out, his family is not as badly off as Herschel thinks. His act, on the other hand, makes things much worse for Jews when, three days later, they are set upon by all manner of thugs. Kirsch, though, gives Grynszpan a pass on Kristallnacht: “Sooner or later, and with or without a high-profile pretext like the one that Grynszpan unwittingly provided, the Nazi machinery of violence would have been set into motion against the Jews.”

In June, 1940, when the Nazis enter Paris, Grynszpan is moved south and finds himself free, but in very unheroic fashion, chooses to seek out his French captors, who eventually turn him over to the Nazis. And this is where Grynszpan’s real heroism manifests itself, according to Kirsch: To thwart Hitler’s plans for a show-trial, he then lies and says that he and vom Rath had been engaged in a homosexual affair. He knows this will mortify Hitler and Goebbels — their star Nazi martyr, vom Rath, a homosexual? — which it does. The trial is postponed and never takes place, thus depriving the Nazis the opportunity to engulf its people further in the flames of lethal anti-Semitism. Still, it’s worth noting that without this show-trial, six-million Jews were still slaughtered.

There isn’t a lot about the Grynszpan case that is straightforward. Even the timing and manner of his death is in dispute. But this enigmatic boy, who could have avoided a show-trial without claiming a homosexual affair — rather than pounding on a penitentiary door seeking incarceration, he could have escaped — hardly belongs in the same company as, say, the Bielski brothers or Oskar Schindler. (Indeed, many Jews at the time condemned Grynszpan’s act.) And while Kirsch has done an admirable job of telling Grynszpan’s story, he has oversold him as a hero. In the final analysis, he is closer to being just another tragic figure from a time and place that produced far too many.

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